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The morning started bright. At 6.30, women of all ages (and a few brave men) gathered in a group on St Andrew’s suspension bridge, spanning the river Clyde. Beneath them, a small boat slipped through the glass-smooth water rowed by Glasgow’s Lord Provost Eva Bolander, wearing her chains of office. Boxed on its deck was a flag called the Bower of Bliss made by the artist Linder and destined to hang on the mast at Glasgow Women’s Library.

The group walked in procession behind Linder, the Provost and the flag, to watch Linder’s new film work in the library’s atrium amid a cloud of incense. Then followed bread and jam washed down with herbal cordial as they looked over a selection of feminist publications from the 1980s, and anti-suffragette propaganda from the 1910s.

The day ended bright too. With sunlight glowing through the stained glass windows of a tenement building near Glasgow’s Queen’s Park. On the top floor, in a sometime bedroom, a group named in honour of the writer Radclyffe Hall had staged a scholarly exhibition of works from the 1970s and 80 that celebrated lesbian sexuality: among them, photographs by Catherine Opie, De LaGrace Volcano, Ingrid Pollard and Jill Posener. Much of the material was joyfully 18-rated, drawing on the fetish scene and explicit film works. A border terrier trotted in and out, and occasionally a smoke-grey cat came and lay on the bed.

Such experiences show Glasgow International Festival at its best: a celebration of art embedded in the daily life of the city and driven by the passion of its inhabitants. It’s Glasgow’s party, and you’re lucky to be invited. This is an unusual trait amongst big Biennial exhibitions, which too often feel as though a program of exhibitions and events has been conceived in sterile international space and plonked in a random location.

In truth, some of the main GI program this year feels a little scrappy (instinct suggests there may have been some tightening of the budget – it certainly feels to be teetering on a shoestring in places) but there is a scattering of pearls.

Tramway: Mark Leckey and Tai Shani – powerful, squelchy and intimate

At Tramway, Mark Leckey has installed a life-sized version of an 18th-century figure of Job, hollowed out and filled with a speaker system that causes the beset figure to vibrate and hum with sound and speech. He faces a filmed version of himself in various guises, including a weird kind of CGI endoscopy – the camera moving through a hollow, fleshy body and seeing the face from within. It’s not the happiest portrait of the contemporary human condition, but it is inescapably powerful.

In the adjacent gallery Tai Shani’s Dark Continent: SEMIRAMIS combines sculpture, a masque-like performance and text by the artist exploring female sexuality (an area of experience Freud termed “a ‘dark continent’ for psychology“). The text is squelchy and intimate, shifting from scenes of joyous abandon through nasty adolescent encounters.

“Girls like you get into trouble” the narrator is told by a boy at her school as he tries to press himself on her. On a stage dressed with mystic objects, a group of women arrange themselves in tableaux inspired by the fifteenth-century proto feminist text The Book of the City of Ladies.

The five best things to see at Glasgow International

Photo: Sean Campbell. Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Duggie Fields The Modern Institute
Paintings by the self-mythologising British pop artist dating from the 1970s to the present day are shown inside a maximalist mock-up of his London flat (above), complete with a mirror-bedecked bathroom, and leopardskin bed covered in cushions decorated with his artworks.Mark Leckey
Nobodaddy, Tramway
A grisly portrayal of the contemporary condition, Leckey reimagines The Thinker as Job, the Biblical figure beset by disasters emotional and physical. Leckey’s Job is hollowed out and filled with a sound system, with speakers broadcasting from his sores.

Dmitri Galitzine, At This StageSWG3
Aptly installed inside a music venue, Galitzine’s three-screen video work explores the interior goings-on of Dance Attic Studios, a renowned rehearsal venue in London. What emerges is a private world of dreams and aspirations where the line between reality and the make believe is never entirely clear.

Hardeep Pandhal, Self-Loathing Flashmob
Kelvin Hall
Pandhal seems to be everywhere at the moment (he also has a solo show at Cubitt Gallery in London, works on show at Nottingham Contemporary and in the New Museum Triennial in New York) – here he presents cutout versions of the wobbly cartoon images that appear in his animated videos, and a film work made in response to the student protests in 2010.

Corin Sworn Koppe Astner
Sworn built a flat inside the gallery, sliced through its walls and filmed performers inside the space using a nanny-cam type surveillance camera intended to help working parents as they struggle to balance the demands of family and career. Much like the hand sanitisers mounted on the walls of the gallery, Sworn suggests that such devices are a means of deferment: products that deny the messy and emotional qualities of real life.

SWG3: Judy Blame remembered

The newly renovated and enlarged venue SWG3 offers a host of delights, including a small exhibition of jewellery and collage by the legendary fashion world figure Judy Blame, who died in February of this year. A brick-walled former industrial space now used as a music venue houses A Roomful of Lovers (Glasgow) by artist Richard Wentworth and writer Victoria Miguel. Long stretches of heavy steel chain are strung around the space, from which, in places, dangle sheets of text, either single words or long strings of thesaurus-like free association. Everything is connected.

Upstairs in a smaller club space, Dmitri Galitzine’s three-screen film work At This Stage probes the hopes and dreams of the performers that pass through a London rehearsal studio.

Installation view of Judy Blame exhibition at SWG3

The Modern Institute and Kelvin Hall: snails and Tupac

The two venues of The Modern Institute swing from wild maximalism to disconcerting minimalism with great humour. One venue recreates the unrestrained interior of pop artist Duggie Fields’s London flat as a setting for an exhibition of his highly coloured paintings. The artist and his parents appear as acrylic cutouts, and Duggie Fields merchandise, including plates, cushions and badges, are scattered liberally.

The other gallery, given over to the Swiss artist Urs Fischer, has been left completely empty save two disconcertingly realistic snails positioned on the floor.

Think Roobarb and Custard animated by a Tupac fan from a Birmingham Sikh background picking through British racism and social stereotypes and you’re on the right track

The young Birmingham-born artist Hardeep Pandhal is a star in the ascendant, his work often combining his own rapped text and cartoonlike animations that explore socio-political issues with dark humour. Downstairs at Kelvin Hall he’s installed large cutouts of his familiar wobbly cartoon figures – think Roobarb and Custard animated by a Tupac fan from a Birmingham Sikh background picking through British racism and social stereotypes and you’re on the right track.

GI is scattered across 78 venues around the city and interventions pop up in the most unexpected places – from freely distributed newspapers, to video works in shop windows, to a lavish building hoarding by Mick Peters that features painted interiors that you can peep into through spy holes worked into the design.

Chris Evans Virgin Radio Breakfast Show debut had 'too many Sky plugs'

National Television Awards 2019: All you need to know

Here's who has joined Chris Evans in switching from Radio 2 to Virgin

How to watch the Surviving R Kelly documentary on UK TV

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